AGENDA | Sunday, August 23, 2009 | Email | Print | 
The Shah Rukh Khan Saga : Islamophobia in the West
Post 9/11, measures that the US has undertaken to screen visitors have proved both unnecessary and counterproductive and caused avoidable anguish in the minds of even those who otherwise admire the values ordinary Americans cherish, says former diplomat G Parthasarathy
In February 2002, shortly after then US President George Bush had ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan for their role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I had occasion to visit the capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty. As we went through immigration, I noticed that passengers from a Pakistan International Airlines flight which had arrived half an hour earlier were still waiting to enter the Immigration Hall. When I asked an immigration official in Russian why the PIA passengers were still waiting, despite having arrived before us, the official casually remarked that flights from Pakistan had to be very carefully checked, lest they were carrying terrorists. This treatment was being meted out to passengers from Pakistan, despite the fact that Kazakhstan is an Islamic country. We unfortunately come from a region where our western neighbourhood is regarded universally as the epicentre of global terrorism. And to people abroad, we Indians do not look very different from our neighbours across our western borders.
Some years later in 2006 I went along with a group of five academics to Ireland to study how travel and trade was being facilitated across the “soft border” separating Ireland from British ruled Northern Ireland. While four of us sailed through immigration and customs, the fifth member of the group, a young Kashmiri Muslim scholar, was taken aside and grilled for almost half an hour on his antecedents and on why he was visiting Ireland. Muslim friends of mine who visit the United States have frequently complained at what is obviously a policy of racial, religious and ethnic profiling of visitors from countries or regions where terrorists are known to have an interest in hitting western targets. While visitors to the US, whom immigration officials suspect may become illegal immigrants have, for years, been asked to step aside and been grilled, post 9/11, immigration officials in the US and Europe now carefully screen anyone they consider could conceivably be a terrorist threat. Even women invite special attention. The wife of one of my colleagues told me that one sailed through immigration much faster if you are clad in a saree, rather than a salwar kameez which is regarded as the attire of Muslim women!
Despite official denials, the reality is that both the United States and Europe are now stricken by what can only be described as “Islam Phobia”, wherein the burden of proving that he or she is not a terrorist lies with the visitor. While nationals of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries have borne the brunt of such profiling, Indians are not immune to being similarly profiled. The recent episode involving megastar Shah Rukh Khan in Newark has to be seen in this perspective. Most immigration officials across the world are trained to be ostensibly polite, but also have a suspicious mind. It is quite obvious that “King Khan” unfortunately ran into an immigration official with a rabidly suspicious mind. Mr Khan was also perhaps one of the few persons in his flight with a Muslim name and that too a name like “Khan” which must have conjured up paranoia about his perhaps being one of the “Talibanised” Khans from Pakistan’s wild west — the Northwest Frontier Province — or from the Taliban heartland in Southern Afghanistan!
None of these developments, however, justifies the clumsy and often arrogant manner in which American officials have behaved towards outsiders in recent years, in violation of the very values the US espouses to the outside world. Detention without the due process of law of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, the excesses of Abu Ghraib Prison, the “rendition” of suspected terrorists to countries like Egypt where torture is routinely practised, have all eroded the moral and value based leadership the US professed to provide to the world. Worse still, the measures the US has undertaken have proved both unnecessary and counterproductive and caused unnecessary and avoidable anguish and anger in the minds of even those who otherwise admire the values ordinary Americans cherish.
The Americans can rightfully claim that the measures they have taken have prevented any recurrence of a 9/11 style terrorist attack on their homeland. While it is no one’s case that the US should compromise its national security, or lower its guard at its immigration counters, do the present procedures in any way further safeguard their national security? Any applicant wishing to visit the US gets his antecedents thoroughly checked. The applicant not only has his fingerprints taken but also has a bio-metric test involving photographing of his eyes. The fingerprints and cornea profile are fed into the computers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the US Government. The fingerprinting and cornea profile ensures that no other person can enter the US on the passport of the applicant. Every visitor to the US has his fingerprints and his corneal profile rechecked while completing immigration formalities, to confirm it tallies with those of his visa application. One presumes that the blacklist on which immigration officials accept or reject requests for entry into the US are also available to US embassies abroad. These embassies would not, therefore, issue visas to people who figure in the list of those banned for entry. Why then is it necessary on security grounds to harass visitors on arrival even after checking his fingerprints and corneal profile? This, however, need not apply if there is legitimate reason to believe that the visitor may overstay or become an illegal immigrant in the US. Such visitors would necessarily have to be questioned in some detail.
The explanation of the US authorities that Shah Rukh Khan was detained because his luggage had not arrived is specious. Immigration checks are completed before one can enter the area where baggage is collected. Do immigration authorities detain every traveller whose baggage is misplaced by the airlines he travels on? Home Minister P Chidambaram is scheduled to visit the US shortly. He will no doubt be taking up these issues when he meets his counterparts in Washington. But matters cannot be allowed to rest at the ministerial level alone. President Barack Obama has often said that measures restricting individual freedoms taken during the “War on Terror” waged by the Bush Administration has sullied America’s image and brought into question the values it had claimed it stood for. The problems which ordinary law-abiding Indians face when they visit the US should be taken up with President Obama when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets the American President during their scheduled Summit in Washington.
While one naturally resents profiling on ethnic and religious considerations, it must be mentioned that our so called “VIPs” and “celebrities” are treated with so much deference and even provided with unwarranted security cover at the tax payer’s cost that they develop bloated egos. (Mr Shah Rukh Khan has a charming sense of modesty and does not fit into this category.) One of the oddest things one often sees is Ministers and politicians having their briefcases carried into the aircraft by an attendant! We still have a feudal mentality and fail to recognise that in countries like the US even “celebrities” like Vice President Al Gore and Senator Ted Kennedy have been at the receiving end of hard security checks at airports. Rules are equally applicable for all and exceptions are only for serving high dignitaries and designated foreign visitors. Our “VIPs” and “celebrities” would have to leave their huge egos behind when travelling abroad to countries which have discarded feudal behaviour and norms decades ago.
The Terminal
Shah Rukh isn’t the only Khan who has been detained at a US airport
Detaining Asians and singling them out for special security checks is nothing new at US airports. In 2002, Indian Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry cancelled his US book tour, worn out, he said, by “the 100 per cent frequency of the so-called random checks at the airports.”
More recently, earlier this year, former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam was frisked at Delhi’s IGI Airport by the staff of a US carrier. He was reportedly made to take off his shoes and asked to wait before being frisked. Indian law exempts former Indian Presidents from security checks at airports. The airline later apologised.
Actors Zayed Khan and Irrfan Khan, film director Kabir Khan and TV actors Iqbal Khan and Eijaaz Khan have, post the Shah Rukh episode, all gone on record saying they have been detained at various times at US airports.
“There have been times when I’ve been with 17 people in a team on tour, or for a shooting in the US. Out of these only one gets detained at the airport while the others get cleared in no time at all ... Guess who invariably gets detained? And some Caucasian bully who does this checking by the book and who thinks all Khans are terrorists will tell you it’s a random check. Tell me, how can there be random checks at five US airports one after another and in all of them only yours truly gets detained for additional checking?” asked Zayed Khan.
“More than the physical torture, it’s the wounds of humiliation that never heal after you undergo such a horrific experience. It happened to me on two occasions. I was detained in New York and Los Angeles airports for secondary interrogation. I was outraged,” said Irrfan Khan.
Bollywood actor Neil Nitin Mukesh, too, was detained in the United States when he was there for the shooting of his recent film New York on grounds that he was too fair-complexioned to be an Indian!
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